Flat UI Colors
flatuicolors.com
flatuicolors.com
http://xwinman.org/screenshots/blackbox.jpg
http://fc01.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2011/235/4/8/darko_blackbo...
http://www.gregdonner.org/workbench/wb_13.html
(2.x went bevelled, and none of us looked back)
Here is a recolored screenshot using the UI colors cited above: http://oi60.tinypic.com/140yiqr.jpg
Now it only needs some font aliasing and it is fit for a revival.
Obviously someone does.
I wonder whether this is because flat design does away with all the helpful instinctive visual cues that were developed over the last decades (e.g. shadows, faux-3d borders etc) and needs to find new colours because there's no other way of expressing relationships?
Is it the case that designers have been forced to come up with 'more' colours under duress because of this, and have to try out new colours? Or is it that people genuinely like them? Or does 'like' not come into it? Or is there just one very influential designer at e.g. Google who has a different aesthetic to me?
EDIT: I'm commenting on the colours on the page linked to this discussion. Not colours in general.
One could ask "Why do we define a fashion, given this fashion costs heaps to everyone in the industry and isn't necessarily nice or ergonomic". Remind that for every free land, humans will populate it, define rules and laws and regulations and fashions and richness, and whether it is good or not it can only go forward, with more laws, regulations, fashions and richness.
And taste only tells how close you are with society and how distinct you are from uniformity. http://xkcd.com/915/ So you must both stick to the trend and stay peculiar. The trend is defined by very few "haute couture" designers in the industry and we're only adapting it to our clients.
I did an unsolicited redesign of a wikipedia article page a few months ago (mostly a tweak to the current layout). Although Wikipedia is a website rather than an app, the site's pages are are quite stark and many pages feel bereft of colour. In my (unsolicited) redesign I added colour to soften the appearance of the page and to highlight elements. Are the colours superfluous? Or do they make the page or site more pleasant to read? Opinions very welcome :-)
Here's a direct link to one of the designs (PNG image: the file is quite large at 2.7mb)
http://www.interfacesketch.com/wikipedia/wikipedia-article-r...
I like interfaces that have nice 3D effects, especially on a window manager. I like high information density. I like being in control and having a customisable experience. Metro flies in the face of all of those.
This is one of the biggest crimes of flat design. Let's throw away all the opportunities for high information density and replace them with flat blocks of color!
Seems a little unfair.
>> Seems a little unfair.
Not when you've been using computers for 35 years and have seen it migrate from flat to nice to gratuitous and now back to flat.
The original bevels on buttons were a nice indicator that it was in fact a thing you could push. Lots of subtle cues were added in the late 90's and UI probably reached a high point. Then the graphics hardware got awesome and compositing with lots of effects became possible. These were used because they looked neat at first glance. Designers wanted to stand out and went crazy with bling. Then there was backlash, and now the trend is toward flat, simple, and frankly - in many cases - ugly UI. The pendulum is swinging too far back the other way IMHO. But not to worry, it will go back in time and we'll eventually have another high point. Probably better than the previous high since touch and swipe and all kinds of new things will be properly part of the picture.
Flat UI means less code and easier maintainability. It holds up better across a wide range of sizes. It makes it easier to have a style guide in code and create reusable modules. This allows the design team to focus on the bigger-picture user experience instead of perfecting button gradients.
High information density is great in many applications, especially interfaces supporting complex tasks for expert users. However, it takes a lot of work to design a great high-density interface. I feel like most of the high density interfaces I see are more of a case of the design or product teams not being able to make hard decisions about what's really important.
While some flat UIs certainly go too far in the other direction, I firmly believe that minimalism encourages good design by forcing a conversation about what information to prioritize. Especially for the mainstream consumer web, this is almost always better for everyone.
Finally, I don't appreciate this kind of attack on my profession. Good design is far closer to engineering than to taste. I don't think I'm hoodwinking people into hiring me.
Rather, I'm not so quick to have an opinion on aesthetics, because I think philosophically, beauty defines a balance between simplicity and engineering. Every part expresses itself perfectly.
There are ideals that work across the majority, and there are ideals that are appreciated by a niche audience. There is the Ideal, which is never achievable, and there is the expression of the Ideal, which always exists. Engineering or design, I don't see a difference. Different content, same concept.
Nice one, apple.
My search results come up as cards with a tiny sliver of map, then I click on the map and they all disappear, sometimes if I scroll around desperately some will load eventually. But all I wanted in the first place was a full screen map with some icons, not one by one cards to click, also with tiny slivers in them.
Not even an isolated incident. I takes half a dozen clicks when getting directions now as well and several other tasks. I don't think the Google graphics designers are being forced to perform usability studies like they should be. If they were, they would realize some level of 3D actually helps users determine what is clickable or not.
Older people are a great example of why consistency matters. Whenever I show my ageing mother a new website and it isn't incredibly clean + simple to look at it. Her brain shuts right off, she stares at it and waits for me to do something with it.
The first time she saw Android on her new Nexus she immediately was able to start tinkering with it. Flat design, limited colour and gradients, fewer distractions.
I don't understand the complaint about the colours being used on flat designs. Do you have your screen brightness turned all the way up? Turn it down you might notice how bland and grey a lot of older websites look - bevels don't save them.
Either one of these would work: http://jsfiddle.net/5u2j549q/
Flat itself is a design fad like any other, and the reality is the app's appearance and adherence to trends is a real signal of quality to most users.
There's a difference between having a platform-specific GUI/style-guide (which I support), and changing it every few years for no apparent reason (I understand e.g. the change from Apple OS 9 to OS X - they were simply catching up with the hardware improvements - but OS X to OS Y(osemite) seems quite arbitrary).
How could it possibly be anything else?
This is especially true in software. Some additional constraints must be put on to narrow down on a single design. Maybe the constraint is developer familiarity, or developer laziness, or fashion, or whatever.
While there can clearly be 'too much' fashion, its not quite a given that current trends lie in that area, any more than previous trends have.
If you look at clothing design, the fashion side is mostly outlandish and completely impractical. Eventually good ideas filter out of that and get into everyday clothing manufacturing, which is what everyone can actually wear.
The problem with UI design is that UIs need to be used every day, like ordinary clothing, but its becoming like clothing fashion: changing too often and usually full of flashy but unusable cruft. This would be ok if it was limited to a small number of fashionable websites, but instead everyone (but most developers) want the flashy.
For many websites, sure, it is superfluous, but the psychological effects are massive; ignore it at your own peril.
Real applications pretty much ignore all that and look like they always have
The gap from high-end fashion to everyday brands is not so big - take a look at e.g. GQ and look around you to see what people actually wear, and you will quickly start seeing the same patterns and cuts and colours a few months offset (because the fashion magazines tends to report on the upcoming season), just in cheaper imitations - for the most part. And you'll see them spreading as they filter down the cost ladder.
And by the time "everyone" is wearing the cheap imitations, you'll see people in the designer brands wearing different styles and the cycle starts again.
It's the same with UI's: There's a continuous cycle of trying to look modern, refined and exclusive, and so it needs to be regularly reinvented, or it will look old-fashioned, drab and cheap.
It's not about wanting "flashy" (mostly; there are certainly sub-cultures that value flashy above following mainstream fashion). It's about wanting "modern" and "high value".
It depends whether you mean fashion in design principles driven by evidence or visual fashions like in clothing. I think both are inevitable to some degree.
For some reason, we designers are still designing with this mentality.
I think it's always been fashionable to have a modern UI. Just look at windows (the concept). I think the trends are just moving faster nowadays, as the tools to related to developing UIs become more accessible.
I'm already tired of guessing what is and isn't a button.
I can't tell if you're being serious. But if you are, could you explain why?
Otherwise, this is one of many reasons I don't like flat design. It doesn't take advantage of all those pixels. It's just a flat wash of color.
My girlfriend has, I think, an android 2.3 phone. Flat designs are HORRIBLE on it. However, they look crisp on a retina phone, so much that it actually look like the screen is made of physical (material) components.
As for people liking it or not? That's just a trend. We are going back to skeuomorphism in a few years, mark my word.
I think it's best to try to get rid of unnecessary garbage in your UI, maybe that's the skeuomorphism, or maybe it's the amount buttons, images, content, etc. If done well, flat design is a usability win.
Bonus points if you mention the last time a particular trend surfaced.
Imo flat design came largely from responsive web design. It's just easier to build nice looking ui which adapts to any screen size when it's flat. This of course was why it suited android, because they have hundreds of diff screen sizes to cater for...
It's a pretty good intermediary until — one mythic day — we can access the clipboard via js.
EDIT. Link to relevant stack overflow answer describing the flow: http://stackoverflow.com/a/17528590/2236561
they don't. I've seen this page many times over the past year.. same colors every time.
This site never seems to copy the colour code first time.
But who was first?
Hey dummies: Flat design is a concept. It's not a fashion trend with specific "in" colors.
Some time ago, a bunch of idiots got their hands on UI design, and are turning into a fashion show.